The present invention relates generally to handprint terminals and more particularly to an apparatus for emulating computer keyboard input from a handprint terminal.
Handprint terminals are known in the art. These terminals generally include a digitizing tablet which converts movement of a stylus on a sheet of paper as characters are printed thereon into data signals and a handprint character recognition device which recognizes the characters represented by the data signals produced by the digitizing tablet and outputs handprint data. The handprint data comprises data corresponding to the particular character along with data corresponding to the row and column position of each character. In most handprint terminals, the output data is in the form of a serial stream with the row and column position for a character following the data for the character itself.
Handprint terminals may be used as input devices for communicating with a computer and are especially useful in entering text.
One of the problems, however, associated with using a handprint terminal as an input device to a computer is that most computers are programmed to enter data received from a computer keyboard and are not programmed to enter the type of data emitted from a handprint terminal. As is known, the output from a computer keyboard is a serial stream of data corresponding to characters and/or functions, the order in which the character keys and/or function keys being depressed by the typist determining the order in which the corresponding data signals are sent to the computer. The data does not contain positional information. On the other hand, in a handprint terminal characters may be printed at any location on the digitizing tablet and the handprint data emitted will be in the order in which the characters are typed and will contain the character data and also the row and column positional data for each character.
Accordingly, the need exists for an apparatus for converting data from a handprint terminal to form equivalent to that of data outputted from a computer keyboard. Such an apparatus would enable a handprint terminal to be used as an input device to any computer programmed to accept typewritten data without having to make any software or hardware changes in the computer.
An example of a handprint terminal is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,375,081 to B. Blesser. Other references of interest include U.S. Pat. No. 3,112,362 to E. A. Pecker et al; U.S. Pat. No. 3,399,401 to T. O. Ellis et al; U.S. Pat. No. 3,487,371 to A. J. Frank: U.S. Pat. No. 3,500,323 to H. L. Funk et al; U.S. Pat. No. 3,705,956 to M. L. Dertouzos; U. S. Pat. No. 3,979,722 to H. Sakoe; and U.S. Pat. No. 3,999,012 to H. Dym.
It is an object of this invention to provide an apparatus and method for emulating computer keyboard input from a handprint terminal.
It is another object of this invention to provide an apparatus and method for converting handprint data from a handprint terminal to a form suitable for entry into a computer that is programmed to enter typewritten data from a computer keyboard.
It is further object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus as described above which enables editing of the handprint data at the line level.